Lyric Petrologies:Languages of Stone in Rilke, Trakl, Mandelstam, Celan, and Sachs.

Poetics;Lyric Studies;German Literature;Russian Literature;Stone;Lyric Subjectivity;General and Comparative Literature;Germanic Languages and Literature;Slavic Languages and Literature;Humanities;Comparative Literature

Pierre, Richard LeeKhagi, Sofya ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Poetics;    Lyric Studies;    German Literature;    Russian Literature;    Stone;    Lyric Subjectivity;    General and Comparative Literature;    Germanic Languages and Literature;    Slavic Languages and Literature;    Humanities;    Comparative Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113578/pierrer_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Lyric Petrologies: Languages of Stone in Rilke, Trakl, Mandelstam, Celan, and Sachs examines the poetics of stone in twentieth-century German and Russian lyric. I illuminate a diverse line of development whereby stone—traditionally a signal of silence, immutability, insignificance, even a crushing heaviness—emerges as the conceptual and figurative ground of reconfigured lyric languages and subjectivities.My close, comparative readings demonstrate that for authors like Celan, Mandelstam, and Sachs, who could hardly have lived through darker times, stone offers alternative but affirmative models for lyric subjectivity. My project defines a set of rhetorical devices that characterize the varying lyrics of stone. Lyrics by Rilke, Trakl, and Mandelstam from the first decades of the century demonstrate what I call invocations of stone, by addressing crafted works (i.e., architecture and sculpture) as signs of human history and affect. Later texts from Celan’s collections of the 1950s and 1960s gravitate toward ;;found” stone, and import geological discourse into lyric—a project foreshadowed in the later texts of Mandelstam, a poet whom Celan translated and declared a formative influence. Their texts think in terms of stone, aligning lyric with notions of stone’s alternative, natural history. Celan;;s texts, along with those of his contemporary Sachs, also seek to write as stone, by emulating stone’s varying legibilities—as a scientific or mystical record of the readable earth, or as a tabula rasa for more idiosyncratic, phenomenological readings. In the light of debates about the legitimacy and efficacy of post-Holocaust lyric, Celan;;s and Sachs;; texts demonstrate stone;;s potentiality to model reconceptualized lyric languages and subjectivities. My readings are buttressed by considerations of the ;;language of things” in texts by Benjamin and others, as well as ideas about lyric subjectivity drawn from Nietzsche, Susman, Adorno, and Anglo-American literary theory. Challenging the suppositions that lyric represents an individual subjectivity, expression, and voice, Lyric Petrologies introduces the poetics of nonhuman, recalcitrant, and mute stone within the context of contemporary revisions of the idea of lyric. My readings in Lyric Petrologies also add to contemporary critical conversations on object theories and new materialisms, by acknowledging and investigating varying ways in which poetic language mediates matter.